Our Hometown Blog

One of the benefits of Our-Hometown’s WordPress publishing platform is access to the wide array of tools we’ve built to help you get your news published online and out to your readers as quickly as possible. Everything from the standard mobile-responsive dashboard, to incorporating third-party tools with our Google Docs Add On, to our Breaking News features and Push Notifications in our apps have aimed to help publishers distribute news quickly across all platforms. Today, we’re going to take a look at a tool that is often overlooked by our customers despite it’s potential to change the way you post your news: Email to Post.

Put simply, this tool does exactly what it sounds like: it receives news via an email and publishes it as an article on your website. Reporting from the field has never been easier. If you have a breaking news story you’re reporting on in real time, just take out your phone and create a new e-mail, address it to the e-mail address you’ve set up to receive these updates, and type in a quick headline and news update. When your e-mail is received, the website will automatically convert it into an article on your website.

You can also assign your article to different categories by including the desired category within brackets in the e-mail subject, as follows: “[Opinion] My Editorial…”

Of course, only verified addresses will be able to publish stories — so even if the general public got ahold of the e-mail that you send news updates to, there is no danger of anyone else being able to publish to your website.

Furthermore, there are a number of settings and options you can configure to make this system work the way you want. You can choose a default category for these articles to end up in, and can even choose whether e-mail-to-post articles should be published right away or saved as a “Draft” for review by an editor before publishing. Many of these settings will have to be adjusted by our support team, but we will work with you to ensure your Email to Post feature is working as expected.

This functionality is made possible by the plugin Postie, and we’re excited about the endless ways our customers can benefit from this tool.

Take ValleyCenter.com, for example, who have recently launched a new iOS and Android App for their website, and have enlisted local schools and emergency services and granted them the ability to post emergency updates directly to the ValleyCenter website. These updates are published immediately to a special Emergency category and are subsequently sent out out as push notifications to any readers using their new app.

If you’re interested in using our Email to Post feature, send an email to ops@our-hometown.com today to get started!

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